(MENAFN- Arab Times) BUDAPEST, July 23, (AFP): Katie Ledecky earned a second gold medal on Sunday at the world aquatics championships in Budapest by helping the United States win the women's 4x100m freestyle final.
Sweden's Sarah Sjostrom had set a world record of 51.71sec in the opening leg, becoming the first woman to break the 52-second barrier.
The USA clocked three minutes, 31.72 seconds with Australia taking silver at 0.29secs back, while the Netherlands earned bronze at 0.92.
Ledecky finished the opening day of the world champs with two golds after her victory in the women's 400m freestyle final earlier at the Duna Arena.
The US were third midway through Ledecky's leg, but the 20-year-old blasted through the final 50 metres to give her team the lead.
She handed over to Simone Manuel, the joint 100m freestyle champion at the 2016 Olympics, who touched the wall just ahead of Australia's Emma McKeon.
Sjostrom's Sweden finished fifth despite a sensational opening 100 metres, beating the previous record of 52.06sec set by Australia's Cate Campbell in 2016. That is the biggest world record improvement in this event since Libby Trickett of Australia beat Britta Steffen's mark by 0.42 in 2008.
Meanwhile, China's Sun Yang won the men's 400m freestyle final in emphatic style at the world aquatic championships Sunday, as his bitter Rio Games rival Mack Horton trailed home a distant second.
Sun clocked 3min 41.38sec to claim gold well ahead of the Olympic champion Horton, who had previously dubbed his rival a dope cheat, as the Australian took silver some 2.47 seconds adrift.
Italy's Gabriele Detti took bronze at 2.55sec.
It was sweet revenge for Sun, who splashed the water and gave a triumphant roar, having been beaten by Horton in the 400m final at last year's Rio Olympics following a war of words between the pair.
Horton had dubbed Sun a 'drugs cheat' after the Chinese served a three-month ban in 2014 after testing positive for a stimulant. In turn, Sun accused his Australian rival of 'dirty tricks' to try and put the freestyle specialist off his game.
Sun's victory in Budapest means he now has eight world gold medals spanning four championships dating back to Shanghai in 2011.
He has now won the 400m world title at each of the last three championships after his Barcelona 2013 and Kazan 2015 triumphs.
Horton could not hide his disappointment after the race and said his time was disappointing. 'I thought I would have been faster, the time stings more than losing,' said the 21-year-old.
'I thought I was capable of more tonight, I tried to be stronger in the front part of the race.
'This is the start of the cycle towards Tokyo,' he added with one eye on defending his Olympic title in 2020.
Two years on from sleeping rough in Budapest on a perilous trek from Syria to Germany, teenage refugee Yusra Mardini is back in the Hungarian capital competing in the world swimming championships.
'I promised myself I'd come back to Budapest another way,' the 19-year-old told reporters Sunday after finishing her 100m butterfly heat.
Now based in Berlin, Mardini gained international attention after surviving near-drowning trying to reach Greece in 2015. A year later she won her heat in the Rio Olympics as part of the Games' first ever refugee team.
During a 25-day journey from her war-ravaged homeland, Mardini used her swimming skills to help drag a leaking dinghy carrying 16 people to the Greek shore, after the engine broke down.
'My sister (Sara) jumped into the water first, then I jumped in after her, (with two men) we had one hand each on the boat and tried to swim and kick to shore,' she said.
Afer more than three hours in the water they arrived on the island of Lesbos, and trekked northwards before getting stuck in Budapest for a week.
Hungary became a hotspot of the migration crisis in mid-2015, after the authorities temporarily blocked onward travel to neighbouring Austria and Germany, which transformed Budapest's railway stations into vast makeshift refugee camps.
'I slept on the floor, in the train stations, it was really horrible,' she said.
The country's fiercely anti-immigration Prime Minister Viktor Orban later erected razor-wire fences along the southern borders to keep out migrants altogether.
'Then, I thought that people were really rude, my coach was afraid, when I said I was going to go back (to Budapest) again, but now it's completely different, so I changed my point of view about the people of Hungary, it's really cool this week,' she said.
'I totally understand the people and their fears, I would have the same fears, but the problem is that people are not trying to get open for it even'.
'I'm not saying that the refugees are 100 percent amazing and angels, all over the world in countries there are good people and bad people, this is how we are also'.
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